


anatomy class

by moonjuicewiththepresident



Series: tma [1]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Blood, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Body Modification, Logic | Logan Sanders Angst, Logic | Logan Sanders Needs a Hug, Logic | Logan Sanders-centric, Teeth, idk man, kind of, magnus archives fusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:55:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23704966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonjuicewiththepresident/pseuds/moonjuicewiththepresident
Summary: Logan greeted them when he entered the room and was met with silence. Not a malicious or angry silence, just silence. Logan had never been self-conscious when teaching, but walking to his seat with those fourteen eyes just… watching him… it made him ever so slightly uncomfortable. He got the oddest feeling they were judging his walk.
Relationships: Logic | Logan Sanders & Morality | Patton Sanders
Series: tma [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1707199
Comments: 3
Kudos: 37





	anatomy class

Logan shouldn’t even have been teaching the class, really. As far as he knew, he wasn’t going to be needed for any teaching on the Biomedical Engineering course this year. He couldn’t say that he was particularly upset. The Human Anatomy module is where a lot of the engineers discover just how messy the human body is, and while the human heart is a phenomenal piece of machinery in terms of design and function, most of the students would be more comfortable holding a transistor. Not to put too fine a point on it, he gets tired of… squeamish students, and was glad that he could avoid it this year.

You can perhaps imagine, then, that he was not best pleased when Patton Bower, the admissions officer, emailed him last November to say that there had been a mistake, and he was needed to take a ‘spillover class’. Apparently the system had accepted more students for the course than there were places, and they were trying to organize an additional class for the seven who were unassigned. It didn’t make a lot of sense to him, Anatomy class wasn’t until the second term, so surely this mistake should have emerged earlier, but Patton just kept saying he didn’t know, he just had seven students who needed tutorials. Logan won’t pretend he took the news gracefully. He had a lot of research due shortly and, well, you know academia - never enough hours in the day. Still, he was the only staff member both qualified to teach the class and technically free when it had to be scheduled. So he agreed, although that really makes it sound like he had more of a choice than he actually did.

Logan didn’t meet the students until the module started that January. He wasn’t responsible for any of the lectures, so the first time he saw them was in our initial class tutorial. They all sat there, all seven, staring at him, and he felt… oddly uncomfortable. There was nothing wrong with them, of course, nothing strange to see or to look at, just that they were so normal looking. He couldn’t remember what they look like. Any of them. He remembers that they each wore blue jeans and a white shirt, though they were all different makes and styles; He thought maybe one of the girls had a skirt, instead. He must have noticed that they were wearing the same outfits, but it didn’t strike him as odd. They all just looked so… normal. Unremarkable. He remembers their names, though, from the register. They stuck with him - maybe because they were such an international group. There was Erika Mustermann, Jan Novak, Piotr and Pavel Petrov, who he thought were brothers, maybe twins, John Doe, Fulan al-Fulani and Juan Pérez.

He greeted them when he entered the room and was met with silence. Not a malicious or angry silence, just silence. Logan had never been self-conscious when teaching, but walking to his seat with those fourteen eyes just… watching him… it made him ever so slightly uncomfortable. He got the oddest feeling they were judging his walk.

The class began, and he started going over some of the basics of anatomy and how the body works. They started to talk then, and some of his unease left him. He doesn’t remember exactly what was said, after doing it long enough most tutorials just kind of blur together a bit, but he recalls being struck by just how basic some of their questions were. The composition of blood, where in the body the various organs sat, the sort of thing that anyone who’s done a high school science class should know. He was almost tempted to ask where they went to school. At the time, he didn’t question the fact that they must have all gone to the same school.

Aside from that, it was mostly normal, except… about halfway through the tutorial, they all discussed the lungs and respiration. Inhalation, alveoli, et cetera. Basic stuff, but Logan paused afterward, just to have a think about where to go next, and he heard the sound of them breathing. That’s not abnormal, but it seemed to fill the silence so suddenly, and all at once. He could have sworn that he didn’t actually hear it before that moment. Like they’d only just then started breathing. Which is, which is absurd, obviously. Logan was probably just listening out for it because they’d been discussing the lungs. Even so, it was disconcerting, and he breathed quite a sigh of relief when the tutorial was over and he could get out of there.

Now, Logan considers himself a conscientious worker, and in all his years at King’s he could count on one hand the number of times he’s called in sick, but when the time came for the next tutorial with that class, he had to stay home with a migraine. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, the thought of sitting there for another two hours with those staring, placid eyes gave him such a spell of anxiety that his brain felt like it was being stabbed with a shard of ice. He did have to teach them eventually, of course. He couldn’t avoid it forever. Re-entering that room, though… All of them were sat in the exact same positions, in the exact same clothes, their breathing deliberate and almost pointed. When one of the girls said ‘Good morning’, the others followed suit, one by one, and Logan had to fight the urge to run. It struck him then, that, despite how diverse their names were, none of them seemed to have any noticeable accent. Not that it did anything to reassure him.

There was no-one else who could take the tutorials. He did everything he could to try and find a replacement. Still, once he got used to their stares, their silence, and the fact that their questions were both specific and oddly basic - one of the Petrovs once asked him “How sharp are the knees meant to be?” - it was just about tolerable. He’s a bit ashamed to admit it, but he came to terms with the fact that he didn’t care if they passed any exams, and that actually made the whole affair more manageable. He just did his best to stop caring.

And then came their first of two sessions in the dissection room. They were looking at the skeleton. Logan had been dreading this. Given exactly how creepy and unsettling the students were just sat in a classroom, the idea of what they could do when given access to human remains made him feel quite nauseous. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave them there alone, so he went.

It was even worse than he’d feared, seeing them stood there over the bits of the cadaver. Their faces, normally so neutral, were alive with… excitement? Curiosity? Hunger? Whatever it was, it didn’t reach their eyes, still staring and blank. Logan went through the procedures with them and tried his best to keep the trembling out of his voice. When Fulan reached for a scalpel and started cutting into our samples, he felt faint.

Logan was trying to keep an eye on everyone, but the dissection tables were arranged in a semi-circle around the lab, and each time he turned to face one of the students, he began to hear this cracking sound from whichever tables he wasn’t looking at. Like a snapping bone, or a ribcage being forced open. He’d turn back and see nothing untoward, just John or Erika or Juan or whoever it was, looking at Logan quizzically over distinctly unbroken bones. But it kept happening. Whenever he wasn’t looking, Logan heard the crunch and the crack of bone. He couldn’t ask about it. Logan knew the dead-eyed, mute stare they’d give me if he did, and he just couldn’t face that.

Finally, he managed to position himself so that he could see what was happening behind him in the reflective edge of the metal table. It wasn’t much, but Logan could see a slightly warped image. It was Pavel, in this case. He saw him pick up a bone - a radius, from the forearm. He held it up next to his own arm, and then there came that snapping, crunching noise. Logan saw his arm distend itself, the skin shifting as something inside changed and rearranged, until it matched the length of bone he was holding up to it.

He tried not to react, not to make a noise at this mad impossibility that he saw. Logan couldn’t help it, though, and his legs gave out. He collapsed on the floor with a whimpering cry. None of them looked at him, none of them offered to help him up, none of them gave any reaction at all. He shut his eyes tight as that cracking sound began to come from every direction, as all seven of them began to change themselves. It went on for almost half an hour, until their allotted time in the lab ended. And then they left, walking past him, still sat helpless on the floor. As they did, each of them thanked him for the lesson as though nothing had happened. Every single one of them was taller than when they started.

He started taking more sick leave after that. Logan avoided their tutorials as often as possible, and when he did go they largely just sat there in silence until one of them asked a question about human anatomy, which he would reluctantly answer. He should have just abandoned them entirely. If they were going to complain to anyone, they would have done it already. But even then, he was worried his colleagues might notice, and he really didn’t want to get a reputation as some absentee tutor. It didn’t help that a colleague of his, Dr. Dee Sanders, once expressed surprise on learning he’d been absent the day before, as apparently he’d passed by Logan’s teaching room and his anatomy class had just been sat there, waiting quietly. The thought of them politely filing into every tutorial, just sat there, blank and staring, whether he was there or not, just waiting… Logan thought that bothered him almost more than being sat there with them.

Still, he managed to largely avoid them until the 21st of March, when they had their second lab dissection. Hearts. Logan was well aware of the sort of sinister nonsense that was likely to happen if he went, but he also knew by now that they would attend whether or not he was there. And to leave them in the lab unsupervised would be the sort of thing that would get him actually fired from his position.

It was a rainy morning. Logan remembers that, because he deliberately didn’t put up an umbrella. Something inside him was so dreading what was going to happen that the very act of opening umbrellas seemed pointless, as though his being dry couldn’t stop what was coming, then there was no reason not to get soaked. So Logan was dripping wet when he entered the lab, and his glasses had steamed up to the point where he could no longer see through them. When he wiped them clean, they revealed those seven blank faces, utterly unconcerned with his sodden state. Each had somehow got the heart laid out in from them on the dissection tray. He decided not to prolong it and waved them to start.

They just began to dissect the hearts, as any other class would, occasionally asking him polite questions. Logan was so taken aback at how normal the whole situation seemed to be that it took him some time to actually answer them. He did, though, and the first hour of the class almost put him at least a little bit at ease. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Maybe they were doing weird things to their insides, but if it was the heart, then he couldn’t see it and he couldn’t hear it. And Logan had long since decided with this class, that if he couldn’t see or hear it, he didn’t care.

Then Erika Mustermann held up her heart and looked at him. Logan began to get that sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as she asked him. 

“How does the heart pump blood?” He started to explain the biological mechanisms of the heart pumping when she shook her head slowly and said, “What does it look like?” And then, when he didn’t answer, “Is it like this?”

The heart in her hand began to spasm. Not like the regular, rhythmic pulse of a heartbeat, but like a balloon being rapidly squeezed at one end. Bits of it swelled and stretched and distorted seemingly at random, and blood began to flow haphazardly from the ventricles, dripping down Erika’s forearm and dribbling onto the floor.

Logan stood there speechless, staring at this horrible miracle, from when behind her he saw Fulan raise his heart, saying, “That’s not what it’s like.” And blood starts to gush from all over his heart in tiny geysers, shooting in every direction. Soon each of them is holding a heart up, each pumping and throbbing differently, blood leaking, spurting out of them in a different way, a different nightmare. They wanted him to tell them which was right. Logan didn’t know how long he stared before he finally raised his hand to point at Jan Novak, who seemed to have the closest to an accurate impression of a regular human heartbeat. Then he turned and walked out of the lab.

Logan spent the rest of the day sat in the staffroom, waiting for someone to come running in, screaming about the lab being full of blood. He expected questions he couldn’t answer and immediate termination. But nothing happened. No-one came. When he returned to the lab several hours later, there was no sign of any blood, except for the tiniest speck, dried into a tile crack in the corner. Unless that had been there before? He didn’t know. His shoes were still speckled with blood, though, so he knew he wasn’t hallucinating it. He checked with Dr. Sanders, who confirmed that he could see the spots, though Logan neglected to tell him it was blood. He had no intention of inviting further questions.

Logan missed the next three tutorials. He just stayed at home. But something wouldn’t let him just simply let it go. Finally, Logan made a decision. He wanted to see where they lived. He felt like he needed to, for some reason. He needed to see if they existed outside of his class, outside of his mind. He asked Patton and, irregular as it was, he gave Logan the address. It didn’t surprise him to find out they all lived in the same place. A semi-detached house on Kingsland Road in Newham.

The house itself was run down, as might have been expected, and Logan must have spent a good fifteen minutes just stood in front of it, waiting for the courage to approach. Finally, he knocked on the door. The wood was old and dry, and some flaked off under his knuckles. It opened immediately, and there stood Jan Novak. When she saw him, her mouth twisted into something he thought was meant to be a smile.

“Hello,” She said, “Have you come to give us more lessons? We would like to learn about the liver.” Her eyes locked onto his abdomen.

He was about to reply when a muffled scream of pain came from somewhere deep inside the house. It sounded ragged, like whoever was crying out had been gagged. Logan looked to Jan Novak, who showed no indication she had heard it, still staring at where he had taught her his liver would be. He ran, and she watched him go without moving.

He did call the police, but they just told him that the house was currently unoccupied, and they’d found no evidence that there had been anyone present. Logan took great pains never to see the class again. He avoided all tutorials, and simply waited until the end of term. He hadn’t seen them since.

When he went to the classroom shortly after what should have been their final tutorial, Logan found something on the desk. It was an apple. Next to it was a handwritten note that said: “Thank you for teaching us the insides”. He burned the note, just in case.

Believe it or not, Logan wasn’t an idiot. He obviously wasn’t going to eat it, So he cut it in half And… Human teeth. Inside were human teeth arranged in a sinister smile.


End file.
